One type of electronic weighing scale utilizes a resistive strain gauge type load cell for determining the weight of a mass being weighed. This type of scale is used in many settings, such as the food service industry where these scales are used, for example, for portion control and for measuring ingredients of food recipes. Portion control is important to many food service organizations, such as franchised restaurants, where the portions of certain ingredients, for example, weight of meat used in a particular sandwich or weight of ice cream used in a certain size cone, provided to a customer must be tightly controlled to maintain profitability. Regarding the measuring of ingredients, when bakers and cooks follow carefully proportioned recipes, they must use the proper amount of certain ingredients. Sometimes the ingredients can be readily measured by weight using a weighing scale.
Electronic weighing scales manufactured for the food service industry typically have fixed capacities in the 2-pound to 10-pound range. Generally, a scale customer will select the capacity of the scale based on the food and/or drink item(s) they will be weighing with the scale. In addition to selecting the capacity of a scale, scale customers sometimes like their scales to be customized in various other ways, such as the responsiveness of the scale display to the change in weight being placed on the scale at a particular time. For example, a customer that uses a scale to weigh meat for a certain size sandwich does not want a quick response because the tradeoff is increased sensitivity to small disturbances. On the other hand, a customer that weighs liquids as they are poured wants a much quicker response.
The functioning of conventional load-cell-based scales is typically controlled by software that is burned into hardware memory onboard the scale. To the best of the present inventor's knowledge, conventional electronic weighing scales are customized by burning differing software into the hardware memories to provide the scales with the desired service characteristics (capacity, responsiveness, etc.). Drawbacks of this type of customization include the limitation that service characteristics of these scales cannot be changed without changing the hardware, and customization can be performed only at the time of manufacture. Consequently, scale manufacturers must manufacture a variety of hard-programmed scales of differing service characteristics, and scale merchants typically need to keep an inventory of the differently programmed scales.